By Tammy Ho Lai-ming

In The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (2025), Nan Z. Da offers a powerful example of how Chinese writers and intellectuals have reimagined the Western canon on their own terms. Her book, a daring comparative reading of Shakespeare's King Lear alongside twentieth-century Chinese history, stands in a tradition of Chinese engagements with Shakespeare, Goethe, Dickens, and Kafka. These acts of reappropriation are strategic interventions instead of derivative borrowings.

Such cross-cultural rewriting has deep roots. In the early twentieth century, as China struggled to remake itself amid the collapse of empire and the pressures of colonial encroachment, reformers turned to Western literature to renew the people and reshape national character. The renowned writer Lu Xun, drawing inspiration from European Romantic and revolutionary traditions, celebrated figures such as Byron, Shelley, Pushkin, and Petőfi as "fighters" whose defiant spirit he believed was essential to the nation's spiritual revitalisation.

Importing Western classics was never a passive exercise. It became a revolutionary means of confronting China's cultural crisis at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1904, Chinese readers first encountered Shakespeare through Tales from Shakespeare, translated into Classical Chinese by Lin Shu. Although Lin did not know English, he worked through interpreters and presented the Bard's tales as shen guai xiaoshuo 神怪小說, or "stories of gods and spirits", thus assimilating Shakespeare into familiar mythic and moral categories. Literary historian Ruru Li notes that Lin explicitly promoted Shakespeare as a writer of shenguai tales, a term familiar to Chinese readers through vernacular supernatural fiction, thereby integrating Shakespeare into the moral and mythic structures of late imperial didactic literature rather than treating him as a realist foreign author (Li). As Nan Z. Da observes in The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, "Like anything else, Shakespeare was altered when it arrived in China". Writers who had only indirect access to the originals nonetheless invoked his name to authorise calls for moral and intellectual renewal. In their hands, the Western canon became a weapon against stagnation. Hamlet, in particular, was reimagined in reformist writings and early stage adaptations as a figure of conscience and resistance, resonating with audiences who, amid the humiliations of the unequal treaties and a pervasive sense of national decline, sought models of integrity and moral courage.

This dynamic of critical repurposing extended beyond Shakespeare. Charles Dickens, for example, entered Chinese translation during the same ferment. Between the early 1900s and the 1910s, as Western ideas flooded China, Dickens's novels began to circulate in partial and adapted forms. Early versions of Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities did more than acquaint readers with Victorian orphans and French revolutionaries. They reshaped Dickens's themes and narrative techniques to illuminate local injustices. In the process, Chinese intellectuals used Dickens's social critique to reflect on and challenge their own society's ills. The stark depictions of poverty in Oliver Twist or the injustices of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities struck a chord in a semi-colonial China beset by upheavals. Reformist thinkers such as Liang Qichao argued more generally that fiction was a powerful tool for what he called "renovating the people." In his 1902 essay On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People (《論小說與群治之關係》), Liang famously declared: "If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction". Dickens's reputation as a socially critical writer supported this broader project.

Goethe's Faust similarly found new life on Chinese soil. The poet Guo Moruo, a titan of early modern Chinese letters, ardently translated and promoted Faust in the 1920s, publishing his influential translation in 1928 and explicitly aligning Faust's striving with China's need for cultural and political renewal, while presenting himself publicly as a "Chinese Goethe". Under Guo's pen, Faust's yearning for knowledge and transformation resonated with a nation seeking scientific and ideological renewal. An oft-repeated anecdote in official biographies of Xi Jinping recounts that as a teenager in rural exile he read Faust by the light of a kerosene lamp and memorised passages, a story circulated in state publications to frame Xi as an heir to world literature and revolutionary perseverance. Whether apocryphal or not, the story indicates how Goethe's themes of temptation and compromise were woven into revolutionary self-narratives. More experimentally, in the late 1990s the avant-garde director Meng Jinghui staged Bootleg Faust, a multimedia, absurdist deconstruction first premiered in Beijing in 1999 that allegorised China's own "Faustian bargain" with market-driven development, an irreverent production that played to packed houses in Beijing and Shanghai.

The case of Franz Kafka in post-Mao China shows how global literature can articulate unspeakable trauma. Kafka's surreal tales of alienation and oppression captivated a generation of Chinese writers in the 1980s who were eager to break the silence around their own nightmares. Kafka had been translated earlier by Dai Wangshu in the 1940s, including The Metamorphosis in 1946, though these early translations circulated with limited impact until the reform era, but it was only in the 1980s that he exploded into Chinese literary consciousness. Authors such as Can Xue, Zong Pu, and Yu Hua found in Kafka a language for their "survival dilemmas and anxieties." Zong Pu's short story Who Am I? depicts a persecuted intellectual who hallucinates that she has turned into a worm, a clear reworking of Kafka's Metamorphosis used to register the psychic scars of political persecution. Yu Hua has said that Kafka "opened the window" for him, liberating his imagination at a moment when it felt shackled. Critics even dubbed Can Xue "the Kafka of China" for her starkly surreal fiction, a label reflecting how thoroughly Kafka's aesthetics of alienation and disorientation had been absorbed into post-Mao experimental writing.

All these instances suggest that Chinese appropriations of Western works are far from acts of simple imitation. Rather, they are strategic dialogues with foreign texts, aimed at illuminating Chinese realities and global ideas of modernity. Nan Z. Da's The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear brings this dynamic into the present day.

During the Cultural Revolution, Shakespeare was largely suppressed as bourgeois art, and King Lear felt uncomfortably close in a time of children denouncing parents and political insanity. After Mao's death, as cultural openness returned, directors seized upon Lear as an allegory of tyrannical folly. But Da's work is not about these stage adaptations. Instead, it asks what happens if Lear is taken as a key for unlocking the enigmas of China's "long twentieth century."

Da explicitly calls Lear "the most 'Chinese' of Shakespeare's plays". She describes her project as a "long and elaborate analogy" between Lear's collapse and modern Chinese history, a daring critical wager that insists on structural comparability rather than surface resemblance. Her claim goes beyond familiar points of overlap such as filial piety, ingratitude, disharmony of scale, and redistribution blind to merit. She argues that both Lear and Maoist China share a "logic of gaslighting, a pain rooted in real withholding, and other crimes and cruelties that come from the empty forms that pop up when the personal totally collapses into the political".

The book unfolds across five sections, "Tales", "History", "Tragedy", "Comedy", and "Romance", each refracting the Lear–China analogy through a different lens.

Da opens "Tales" by examining how King Lear reaches Chinese readers through abridged retellings and simplified classroom versions rather than through the full Shakespearean text. These retellings, drawn from children's anthologies and moral primers, transform the play's tragic complexity into a didactic tale of filial obedience and failure. For Da, this process of repetition, truncation, and mistranslation exemplifies how world literature circulates across languages and regimes of meaning. She links these mediated forms of Lear to the social world of late-Mao and post-Mao China, where rituals of discipline, humiliation, and public speech replay the drama's opening scene of filial testing. Early in the section, Da notes that Lear's "opening bluff had all of the subsequent tragedy coiled within it", identifying in that first demand for verbal proof the seed of later catastrophe. In this way, "Tales" becomes a study of transmission itself: how narratives, like trauma, survive not in purity but through distortion, repetition, and incompletion.

The next section, "History", opens with the bibliographical fact that King Lear appeared as The History of King Lear in the 1608 quarto and The Tragedy of King Lear in the 1623 folio. Da asks what difference it makes to call the play "history" and reads this doubleness through a Chinese problem of historiography, where history is a genre that continually rewrites events to justify power. She contrasts Lear's impossible premise, an abdication staged as ritual speech, with the political theatre of Maoist China, especially the 1947 persecution of Wang Shiwei for exposing hypocrisy within the Yan'an base. Here Da revisits A. C. Bradley's description of Lear as "defective", since "it cannot back-engineer a scenario that could convince you its premise is possible", and places it beside Stanley Cavell's account of the ordinary tragic, catastrophes that are at once unbelievable and everyday. For Da, the improbability that troubled Bradley parallels the way historical violence can seem unthinkable until it repeats. Maoist confessions and purges thus become, like Lear's division of the kingdom, formal acts whose outcomes are predetermined yet endlessly re-enacted.

In "Tragedy", Da develops what she calls the "Learian tragic." Rather than locating tragedy in fate or flaw, she finds it in the everyday mechanisms of harm: small withholdings, petty cruelties, and the routinised coercions that expand until they destroy entire worlds. The section links Lear's emotional economy to Mao's purges and to the escalating self-destruction of revolutionary idealism. Tragedy here is not allegory but resonance: both the play and modern Chinese history show how moral blindness and the desire to test love can spiral into catastrophe. Da writes that "excessive meanness, sadness, betrayal, and ingratitude are enough to make a world-historical tragedy", insisting that the tragic is neither divine punishment nor narrative necessity but a human pattern of repetition.

The fourth section turns to comedy as tragedy's partner. Da observes that Lear is unexpectedly comic, its Fool's riddling wisdom, the grotesque mathematics of Lear's diminishing train, and the farcical self-importance of declarations of love. Comedy, she argues, precipitates tragedy by exposing the absurdity already embedded in power. In Maoist China too, cruelty often took comic form: slogans that bordered on nonsense, denunciation rituals performed as theatre, and bureaucratic absurdities that made violence both ludic and lethal. The critic's task, Da suggests, is to inhabit the Fool's precarious position: irreverent, destabilising, and surviving by wit on the edge of ruin.

"Romance" closes the book with a meditation on love. Da insists that Lear is "about being deeply in love". The term "romance" names both narrative closure and historical return: repetition, recognition, and the persistence of attachment even after devastation. The analogies between Lear and China are sustained not only by cruelty and paranoia but also by enduring bonds between parent and child, ruler and subject, critic and text that refuse extinction. For Da, romance is the afterimage of tragedy: a beginning that survives the end, a reminder that recognition, however belated, remains possible.

What makes Da's book distinctive is its hybrid form. It is not a conventional monograph cataloguing Shakespeare in China. Rather, it blends close reading, historiography, and memoir. Da writes of her grandfather forced to crawl eight hours on new asphalt during a purge, of the humiliation rituals of her kindergarten, and of the difficulty of remembering Maoist traumas within families fractured by silence. These stories are not digressions but part of the method: like Lear itself, Chinese history is hard to remember coherently, prone to gaps, distortions, and sudden revelations. By weaving personal narrative into critical analysis, Da demonstrates that world literature is not only about circulation across borders but about the private work of recognition and analogy.

The critical payoff of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear is its insistence that catastrophe is only visible too late. Da observes that in Lear, "you cannot quite see how bad the situation is." This is a historian's warning that history as it is happening cannot be apprehended for what it is. Only later does its irreversibility become clear. Ordinary Chinese people, like Lear's subjects, lived through storms whose atrocity became legible only in retrospect. The Mao years, she suggests, were a Lear-like tragedy in which the line between love and cruelty collapsed and where formality itself, in ritual, confession, and test, generated destruction.

By drawing this analogy, Da shifts the stakes of world literature. Earlier appropriations such as Lu Xun's Shakespeare, Lin Shu's Dickens, Guo Moruo's Faust, and Can Xue's Kafka drew on foreign works to illuminate Chinese realities. Da appropriates Shakespeare to think historically, not nationally. Her Lear is not "Chinese" because of Confucian resonances but because it becomes a vehicle for reckoning with unspeakable Chinese pasts. She presses the Western canon into service not for pride but for mourning. By reading King Lear as a Chinese tragedy, she refuses both to provincialise Chinese suffering and to allow Shakespeare to remain a relic. Instead, she shows how literature becomes an archive for histories that resist straightforward narration.

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